BREAKING IN MY HOUSE: Popular Dance, Gender Identities, and Postracial Empathies

Does breaking belong within the forms of dance recognized as “house”? How did Hip Hop and house emerge as separate sorts of dance cultures among African Americans, Latinx folx, Asians, Native, and others, and how have they reconciled in contemporary global circumstances? What are some of the ways that gender and racial identities still function in considerations of Hip Hop and house dance? What are some of the important interstices of Hip Hop and house in academic discourses? What are some implications of race in the articulations of popular dance cultures and their circulations? Constructed as a listing of themes elaborated to performative effect, this chapter wonders at the possibilities to write into Black social dance as a rhythmic playing through words; words that might represent thinking-through-dancing as the source of a communal activity.